The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you…Because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.
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Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas


-William Deresiewicz, The Disadvantages of and Elite Education

[via an ecstasy of particulars]